How many senses

It seems perfectly rational to believe you had an internal experience, and somewhat rational to say you can’t doubt you had it. What’s not rational is to interpret it as external – and be unable to doubt that.

It’s not the same as doubting you went running this morning – because that is external. It’s a bit of behavior. It’s true that your memory of it is internal – but it is at least in principle checkable, as Chris Whiley noted. Your inner meeting with God isn’t, which makes it vastly less checkable. Stannard’s physics analogy* is bad because he doesn’t just ‘trust’ the other physicists – he also knows that their work is in principle and fact checkable – he could check it himself. That is not true of all these reports of meeting God in prayer (and of finding ‘yes, that someone does have the characteristics of love and forgiveness and all the rest of it’).

Also – Stannard says in that passage that the experience is repeatable. But it’s not. It’s repeatable (if at all) only by people who have that kind of experience. But experiments are supposed to be repeatable by any appropriately trained person not actually disabled. You could claim that the people who can’t do it are disabled – lack a sense – but that seems far-fetched, especially since the putative ‘sense’ corresponds to no physical organ, as the Big Five do – so it’s dubious even to call it a sense, sixth or otherwise.

The parallel with Wiccans and pagans is more relevant than I made out when I first mentioned it, I think. Because they’re all – apparently – doing the same thing. They all want to meet god or goddess, and believe they will, and set out to hypnotize themselves – and it works. In fact it’s not obvious why Stannard’s claim is anything other than auto-hypnosis. Of course, he can still say ‘Yes it’s auto-hypnosis and that’s how God appears to humans.’ That could be true – but is it rational to think so? Not particularly!

*’I believe a lot of things about physics, not having personally done the experiments. And it is because I trust the people who have done the experiments. It seems to me that if you’re dealing with religious people, who all engage in this prayer activity, and time and again, they keep on coming up with the idea that they are in contact with someone, and yes, that someone does have the characteristics of love and forgiveness and all the rest of it – now that is repeatable…

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12 Responses to “How many senses”

“The parallel with Wiccans and pagans is more relevant than I made out when I first mentioned it, I think. Because they’re all – apparently – doing the same thing. They all want to meet god or goddess, and believe they will, and set out to hypnotize themselves – and it works. In fact it’s not obvious why Stannard’s claim is anything other than auto-hypnosis.”

Lists of phenomena from the contemplation of which “the savage” was led to believe in animism have been given by Sir E. B. Tylor, Herbert Spencer, Andrew Lang and others; an animated controversy arose between the former as to the priority of their respective lists. Among these phenomena are:

Eh. I’m not sure the comparison to pagans holds much water in this particular issue, for several reasons. Pagans on the whole are persons of better epistemology AND better character than Christians, for a variety of reasons:

(1) They don’t really proselytize. Oh, they’ll talk your ear off if you show an interest in what they’re doing, sure. But I’ve never met any pagans who thought that their beliefs were objectively right in some sense and therefore needed to be spread to all and sundry by whatever means available.

(2) Many pagans – probably most pagans – emphasize practice (meditation, ritual, etc.) over belief, and are wholly aware of the highly subjective nature of the experiences linked to their practices. Every serious pagan (that is, excluding flaky New Age dabblers) I’ve ever talked to about it has been almost entirely uninterested in questions about the objective existence of spirits and deities. It’s not so much that they do or don’t believe, it’s that they think it’s not even the right sort of question to be asking: Thinking about whether the gods “exist” in some extra-human way is a category mistake as far as they’re concerned. “Belief” as such just doesn’t enter into pagan practice in most ways.

(3) Along the same lines, I don’t know any pagans who claim that their religious practices are rationally defensible. Again, that would be a category error of sorts. Reason just doesn’t enter into it, or not much. While I’m always suspicious (to say the least!) of the abandonment of reason in any context, it’s much worse to abandon reason while pretending to be – or even believing that you are – rational. The necessary agreement of reason and faith is of course itself an article of faith (certainly not a product of reason, only rationalization) for many Christians. In contrast, while I’ve met many pagans who are quite keen reasoners, I’ve never met any pagans who claim that their spiritual or religious beliefs/practices are grounded in reason.

(4) Leaving epistemology… The actual ethical principles embraced by pagans in general tend to be very liberal/progressive, never reactionary. Whether or not such beliefs spring from their religious practice is almost beside the point: I’m just saying that, as a group, they are preferable to the monotheistic religions in that no sub-groups of pagans EVER devolve into conservative/reactionary fundamentalism.

(5) When pagans claim to be persecuted, they aren’t completely full of shite. There’s little I find more repulsive than Christians in the U.S. claiming persecution from their position of extraordinary privilege and power.

Mind you, I still think pagans are wrong-headed about quite a few things. But mostly I can respect the way they go about their lives, intellectually and morally. I can’t say the same of the typical god-botherer.

G – No, I didn’t mean an overall comparison of the two, just a comparison of this one question of the inner experience. My idea of it comes from reading some books on the subject a couple of years ago – the writers of those particular books at least did seem to take the beings met on the inner journeys as really existing – at least that’s what they said. It was all oddly literal. But maybe the books in question are eccentric that way.

I think our experience base is just different. I’ve met a fairly large number of pagans, and few to none of them have been of a literal-minded bent. Paganism doesn’t seem to attract the literal-minded. But maybe when they speak to or write for each other, they come across as being rather literal because they know the audience. Amongst themselves, they have no need to explain the notion that inner experiences of the gods/spirits are inner experiences, and that talking about spirits in the world is a way of looking at things: It’s a world view, but not necessarily a set of objective ontological claims about the extra-human universe.

Or maybe you were reading something written by a particularly flaky pagan. I hedged a lot – “for the most part,” “pagans I’ve met” – because I’m well aware that there are some pagans who are just completely cuckoo. But since the pagans I’ve known personally find those people embarrassing, I take them to be more the exception than the rule. Amongst the pagans I know, even the ones who are pretty darned crazy in other ways tend to be very wary of making objective universal claims. If they err in this regard, they veer towards the well-charted territory of absurd po-mo epistemological hyper-relativism. As flawed as the hyper-relativists are, I definitely prefer them to the people who take their subjective preferences and inner experiences to be objective facts about the world. For one, the latter make darned uncomfortable neighbors…

My experiences jibe with G’s. Though I’m not so sure that *no* pagan subgroups ever devolve into conservative/reactionary fundamentalist wingnuttery. There are persistent rumors about some small extremist Asatru splinter groups. But I digress.

Druidry is a Celtic spirituality. Like any native spirituality that is rooted in the land, its foundation is that of the earth and the ancestors, through which are honoured the powers of nature. In honouring the earth, the soil that feeds us, the sun that gives us light and warmth, the source of our water, the plants and animals, we honour our external environment. In honouring our ancestors and all who have made us what we are, we honour our internal environment. It is this weave that gives Pagan traditions a good deal of their potency. Every indigenous tradition evolves with the colours and textures of the environment within which it lives. So, while there are similarities between Wicca, Asatru, Native American, Aboriginal, and other ancient spiritualities, they differ significantly because of climate and landscape. Druidry emerged out of the rocks and forests and rain of the Celtic Lands, and its very nature is wrapped in the beauty, power and shifting stories of all that Europe has been over many thousands of years past. Druidry is the practice of honouring the life force as it thrives, lives, dies and gives birth again within these lands”

Cam: as far as I know, there are Asatru groups/individuals whose ideas shade into Neo-Nazism. The “Odalism” propounded by black metal musician and convicted killer Varg Vikernes is a good example. But they’re a minority. Far as I’m aware, most Asatru are quite decent.

I would venture that the popularity of Paganist (i.e. Wiccan/Celticish, Asatru/Odinist, Finnish paganism etc.) beliefs here in Europe has a lot to do with a “regionalist” response to globalization/EU etc., and that there is potential for both progressive and reactionary tendencies there.

For liberal-minded, progressive people, there’s little attraction in national states (and the often – particularly in Protestant countries – nationally defined Christian religions) as a marker of identity. They’re associated with colonialism, brutal warfare, etc. At the same time, the European Union has dubious popular legitimacy. I mean, it’s not as if we stopped hating each other just because we have similar passports and similar fake money (they took our real money away). So there’s a wide tendency – in language issues, culture, politics – to build an identity based on “home region” rather than “nation”.

This is quite pervasive. My own field is languages, and there’s a big effort to widen the use of regional minority languages and dialects (which I am very supportive of). The Christian churches tend to go along with this – i.e. translation of scripture in dialects, usage of dialect or regional language in services, etc. There’s also regionally-based political movements popping up everywhere (usually stopping short of calling for secession, which makes no sense anyway as long as the EU monster’s sitting there in Brussels).

Traditionally, movements like these have always been largely liberal and progressive in outlook. This even goes for the nastier ones in recent European history: the ETA is Marxist; the IRA/Sinn Fein were long a cause celebre in radical left circles in Europe. There’s a few exceptions. The Flemish Alliance in Belgium is rightist – but one could argue it is “national” rather than “regionalist” in character, as Belgian national identity was a bit of a joke right from the start anyway. Then there’s the Lega Nord in Italy. Though they’re cartoon characters compared to real Fascists.

One of the examples on the issue of popular culture is the fascination with prehistorical national roots in Finland and Estonia. There’s a widely popular pseudo-historical view arguing for the Finno-Ugrians to be the primeval population of Northern Europe going back to the last glacial etc. It cannot be viewed as seperate from the national identity/EU issue. What the position does is precisely provide the Finns with mythological “roots” in the heart of Europe (rather than central Russia where the language originated).

I believe Paganism around here to function at least in part as an identity marker to a similar extent. Perhaps not so much for Wiccanism – but definitely Asatru, Finno-Paganism etc. With national states and national religions in decline, “European” identity being a chimera, it’s attractive to place one’s religious identity on one’s own soil, in one’s own home country. Of course, there is potential for that to result in a Blut und Boden ideology, as it actually does at the fringes of the youth subcultures where Paganism is popular (black metal, goths, neo-folk).

Of course, the same goes for the anti-globalization movement in general. There’s a lot of similarities between the anti-American rhetoric of the traditional Euro left and the anti-American rhetoric of the German National Democrats. Some people go full circle. Former radical anti-American leftists such as the RAF militant Horst Mahler become overt Neo-Nazis; and then there’s Neo-Nazis such as the Dutch Eite Homan who make ouvertures towards the anti-American Left (and, in Homan’s bizarre case, Islamic fundamentalism).

Rejecting Christianity as patriarchal and militant, and advocating a more-or-less mythical, ecological, matriarchal religion is not unsympathetic. Rejecting Christianity as a “foreign” importation together with MacDonalds and the omnipresence of Anglo-American culture as alien to one’s national roots and ethnic identity gets a little bit more dicey. Rejecting “Judeo-Christianity” and those seen as its primary exponents (guess who?) – and we’ve gone full circle.

Interesting stuff, Merlijn. Can’t say as I know anything at all about the neopagan movement across the pond, except what you just broad-brushed. But the attraction of regional/ethnic identity in a post-national Europe (which isn’t particularly comfortable with what’s replaced nationalism) makes a lot of sense. Makes one wonder if the kids growing up today will be more amenable to seeing themselves as Europeans rather than English/German/French/Dutch/etc.